"Daniel
Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic study with the residents of
an English village, tracking their use of the different social media platforms.
Following his study, he argues that a focus on platforms such as Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram does little to explain what we post on social media.
Instead, the key to understanding how people in an English village use social
media is to appreciate just how ‘English’ their usage has become. He introduces
the ‘Goldilocks Strategy’: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise
levels of interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor
too hot, but ‘just right’.

Based on
15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern
Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the
consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social
media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospiceños – express
their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the
national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other
urban areas in Chile. In actively distancing themselves from residents in
cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and
express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their
own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños
are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity
that shapes their daily lives.

An
ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a medium-sized town located in
the Kurdish region of Turkey. The town is inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim
Arabs and Kurds, and has been transformed in recent years by urbanisation,
neoliberalism and political events. Elisabetta Costa uses her 15 months of
ethnographic research to explain why public-facing social media is more
conservative than offline life. Yet, at the same time, social media has opened
up unprecedented possibilities for private communications between genders and
in relationships among young people – Costa reveals new worlds of intimacy,
love and romance. She also discovers that, when viewed from the perspective of
people’s everyday lives, political participation on social media looks very
different to how it is portrayed in studies of political postings separated
from their original complex, and highly socialised, context.

How can
people in the spotlight control their self-representations when the whole world
seems to be watching? The question is familiar, but not new. Julia Fawcett
examines the stages, pages, and streets of eighteenth-century London as
England's first modern celebrities performed their own strange and spectacular
self-representations. The book provides an indispensable history for scholars
and students in celebrity studies, performance studies, and autobiography—and
for anyone curious about the origins of the eighteenth-century self.

This book
moves beyond the idea of functionality to explore the many other important
factors that athletes and sporting bodies consider throughout the process of adoption.
Using actor-network theory – an approach common in studies of science and
management but seldom applied in this field – it offers readers an inside view
into elite sport and the part that technology plays in training, competition
and broadcasting.

This book
asks how science fiction has imagined how we shape both our world and other
planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and
environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in science
fiction from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron’s
blockbuster Avatar (2009), in stories by such writers as Ray Bradbury, Robert
Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, among others. It
argues for terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral,
ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, and the politics of colonisation and habitation.
Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an
important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is
shaped by their world. description.

The
first-ever published record of the Cowichan peoples, written for and approved
by the Cowichan Tribes. The book chronicles the rich culture, spiritual
practices and local history using an effective mix of documented records, archeological
evidence and oral tales from prehistory to European contact. Historian Dr.
Daniel Marshall's informative tale begins with the 12 original Cowichan peoples
that fell from the sky to populate the Cowichan Valley's pristine wilderness
and build a society from cedar and salmon -- the foundation of West Coast
Native culture.

Cohen,
Colebrook and Miller turn their attention to the eco-critical and environmental
humanities’ newest and most fashionable of concepts, the Anthropocene. The
question that has escaped focus, as “tipping points” are acknowledged as
passed, is how language, mnemo-technologies, and the epistemology of tropes
appear to guide the accelerating ecocide, and how that implies a mutation
within reading itself—from the era of extinction events. Only in this moment of
seeming finality, the authors argue, does there arise an opportunity to be done
with mourning and begin reading.

Drawing
on a range of canonical and non-canonical literary, cinematic and social
scientific texts produced in post-Unification Italy, Vital
Subjects is an interdisciplinary study of how racial and colonial discourses
shaped the “making” of Italians as modern political subjects in the years
between its administrative unification (1861-1870) and the end of the First
World War (1919).